Life360, a startup that looks to help families keep their loved ones (and their identities) safe, has closed a $750,000 funding round with investors including Seraph Group, LaunchCapital, Founders Fund (via FF Angel), the Band of Angels, and Mark Goines. The service also recently launched to the public at TechCrunch50’s DemoPit.
Life360 offers a suite of services related to safety and security, which are designed to help prevent everything from losing your phone to losing your personal identity. One example is the site’s Emergency ID service, which provides parents with cards/bracelets for their children that instructs first responders to call a designated phone number in the event of an emergency. Calling that number will activate the service and automatically blast a message to any emergency contacts.
Other services include a Lost & Found product (you put physical tags on your valuables with with instructions on how to return the item to you) and identity protection. Life360 also offers an Android app appropriately called ‘Tracker’ which can be used to keep tabs on children during the day, though founder Chris Hulls acknowledges this isn’t all that practical yet because many children don’t have smart phones.
The company’s goal isn’t necessarily to provide all of these services itself. Rather, it wants to offer a set of core products built in-house, alongside services that are offered by third parties. Life360 works to integrate these services into their dashboard, and makes it easy to sign up for them because it can pre-populate key information. This seems like a smart play given how fragmented/confusing the privacy and security market can be, though I’m wondering if Life360 might have some trouble convincing well established services to play ball (especially if they’re going to be listed alongside competitors).
We’ve briefly covered Life360 a couple times before, when the company won the first Android Developer Challenge (good for a $300,000 award) and then again when it was part of this summer’s fbFund REV.
Life360 Introduction Cartoon from Life360 on Vimeo.
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